State,” the “Invisible World,” the “Greatness and Littleness of Human Life,” the “Individuality of the Soul,” the “Mysteriousness of our Present Being,” we may see exemplified the enormous irruption into the world of modern thought of the unknown and the unknowable, as much as in the writers who, with far different objects, set against it the clearness and certainty of what we do know.  But, beyond all, the sermons appealed to men to go back into their own thoughts and feelings, and there challenged them; were not the preacher’s words the echoes and interpreting images of their own deepest, possibly most perplexing and baffling, experience?  From first to last this was his great engine and power; from first to last he boldly used it.  He claimed to read their hearts; and people felt that he did read them, their follies and their aspirations, the blended and tangled web of earnestness and dishonesty, of wishes for the best and truest, and acquiescence in makeshifts; understating what ordinary preachers make much of, bringing into prominence what they pass by without being able to see or to speak of it; keeping before his hearers the risk of mismanaging their hearts, of “all kinds of unlawful treatment of the soul.”  What a contrast to ordinary ways of speaking on a familiar theological doctrine is this way of bringing it into immediate relation to real feeling:—­

It is easy to speak of human nature as corrupt in the general, to admit it in the general, and then get quit of the subject; as if, the doctrine being once admitted, there was nothing more to be done with it.  But, in truth, we can have no real apprehension of the doctrine of our corruption till we view the structure of our minds, part by part; and dwell upon and draw out the signs of our weakness, inconsistency, and ungodliness, which are such as can arise from nothing but some strange original defect in our original nature....  We are in the dark about ourselves.  When we act, we are groping in the dark, and may meet with a fall any moment.  Here and there, perhaps, we see a little; or in our attempts to influence and move our minds, we are making experiments (as it were) with some delicate and dangerous instrument, which works we do not know how, and may produce unexpected and disastrous effects.  The management of our hearts is quite above us.  Under these circumstances it becomes our comfort to look up to God.  “Thou, God, seest me.”  Such was the consolation of the forlorn Hagar in the wilderness.  He knoweth whereof we are made, and He alone can uphold us.  He sees with most appalling distinctness all our sins, all the windings and recesses of evil within us; yet it is our only comfort to know this, and to trust Him for help against ourselves.—­Vol.  I. Serm.  XIII.

The preacher contemplates human nature, not in the stiff formal language in which it had become conventional with divines to set out its shortcomings and dangers, but as a great novelist contemplates and tries to